Question: James, you are definitely one of the busiest filmmakers in Hollywood! First off, congratulations! In five days, it will be the 10th anniversary of The Conjuring.
James Wan: Yes!
Question: This is a great moment to look back and reflect a little bit. You’ve directed 10 films that have been released, and you’re truly one of the most successful directors of all time, with many, many more years to go. Adding in the films you’ve not directed, but produced, and the box office skyrockets—The Conjuring Universe alone has surpassed $2 billion and it’s still going strong. So, let’s go back to the beginning. You had the groundbreaking Saw films under your belt. You’d begun what would become another successful franchise with Insidious, so what drew you to shift your focus into the world of real-life paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren’s cases?
James Wan: Right. I’m a big fan of ghost stories. With Saw, I felt like that showed. It was very calculated, meaning that Leigh Whannell and I knew that we wanted to make a movie that would really pop us out there. And it did that in the way that we had hoped. We felt very fortunate and knew that we wanted to follow that up with more classical storytelling. I’m such a big fan of just classic haunted house ghost stories, and that was the reason why I went off and did Insidious.
And after I’d done Insidious as an indie film, I felt like with my next movie, which was going to be a studio film again, I wanted to keep it in that style, in that classic old school storytelling of haunted house ghost stories that we used to get from the `60s and `70s. And I really wanted to do a movie that was a hark back to that era of filmmaking. It also just felt right that the next movie should be something that’s based on a true-life story. Like any fan of the horror world, I was familiar with Ed and Lorraine Warren’s adventures in the ghost hunting business world. And so I asked my agent if he could find out for me who actually had the rights to Ed and Lorraine Warrens’ life story, and my agent found out and said, “Oh, you know what? It’s at New Line right now, it landed at New Line with Peter Safran and Tony DeRosa-Grund attached as producers.”
So, I went into New Line and I told them how much I love this property. And luckily for me, Walter Hamada, Dave Neustadter and Richard Brener were big fans of Insidious, and they were very excited to hear what I had to say about the Warrens’ story. I pitched them my ideas and they said, “Hey, we’ve got a script. Would you be interested to look at it?” And so it kind of took off from there.
Question: And the box office for that film was off the charts, you really did exactly what you were hoping to do. Looking back, did you and Peter Safran—who would become your longtime partner in this world—did you have any sense that this film would resonate with audiences the way that it did? And what do you think was the element or elements that really just clicked in such a huge way?
James Wan: One of the things I learned about making scary movies is that you need to have characters that people care about. And if people care about your characters, then you can put them into any kind of scary situation, and those scares would resonate because you don’t want to see any harm befall these characters that you like. And it just felt naturally that Ed and Lorraine, and the case with Caroline Perron and her family, would be people that we would care about. And so it was very important for me, from the very start, to cast this movie correctly, and the casting of The Conjuring became its secret weapon. It’s actually its most powerful weapon.
I always say, people go to a Conjuring movie to be scared, but they come back because of Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga. They come back for the sequels because of those two. And I would say they are the reason that the movies have worked so well. And even in the first movie, with the side characters that didn’t come back, played by Lili Taylor, Ron Livingston, and so on…people love those side characters. And I think that’s why the movie resonated as big as it did, because they loved the characters, they loved the family dynamic. They look at them and go, “That could be me, that could be my family.” And I think that was the secret to its success.
Question: That first film also had a scene, I guess it was sort of a prologue, that would go on to, I imagine, be more important than you could have predicted. Tell me about including one of the Warrens’ artifacts, but with your re-imagining of her in your very own way.
James Wan: Well, I’m glad that you brought that up, because creepy, scary dolls are very close to my heart. I love that, and I’ve definitely touched on that in a lot of my horror films. And it felt like a no-brainer that we had to open The Conjuring with a cold opening from probably the Warrens’ most famous case, which is Annabelle, the haunted doll. Annabelle is probably their most iconic and most famous haunted artifact from their museum. And it just felt like the right thing to do in the film, even though it’s different from the main storyline of The Conjuring movie. It felt like it would be a missed opportunity to not bring Annabelle into this film in a bit of a more significant way.
Question: That was, of course, the right decision, because then it spawned its own thing, right?
James Wan: Yes. As we saw when we started showing the movie was how much people really responded to Annabelle. They loved her from the get-go. She felt like she needed her own movie to do her justice.
Question: You’ve also generously created, in addition to The Conjuring Universe, a universe of talent behind the scenes. You’ve brought in Gary Dauberman, David F. Sandberg, Corin Hardy and Michael Chaves and more. What prompted you to grow not just the franchise itself, but all of that creative talent behind the camera? I imagine not every director would be willing to hand the reins over.
James Wan: Yeah, I felt like there was a bigger world within The Conjuring world. And that’s a natural thing, we didn’t force that out. But the Warrens had so many different cases, they had collected in their career so many interesting haunted artifacts in their museum, that we always felt from the get-go that each of these artifacts would have their own stories and I wanted to tell all the different, separate stories. But I knew deep down that I’m not able to direct every one of them. So, we knew that we wanted to find filmmakers that understood the world that we played in, the world that I had created.
With the first spinoff, we had John Leonetti direct Annabelle. John is a director in his own right, he had directed movies in the past, but when I met him, he worked for me solely as a cinematographer. John understands the world that I had created with him, and so he just felt like the natural person to go with. Then I started pulling filmmakers that I had worked with on other projects that really understood and respected the world that I had created with Chad and Carey Hayes, who wrote the screenplay for the first movie, so that they could continue telling the stories that we had started.
Question: And you’re not finished with Ed and Lorraine, because hopefully there’s more to come for them. Can you tell us a little bit about where we’re going to see Ed and Lorraine next?
James Wan: Yeah. So there’s the possibility that this next one, The Last Rites, could be the last cinematic adventure for them. But that doesn’t mean it’s the end of the journey for Ed and Lorraine Warren. There are other avenues that we want to explore moving forward, and we’ve been exploring continuing their life stories, potentially on Max, if that works out. But it’s still early days.
Question: You mentioned the artifact room, and the opportunity there for endless stories. Are there things in there that are still rolling around in your mind, artifacts that need their own story? Because what you have created is really like a horror-filled toy store, wouldn’t you say?
James Wan: It is a horror Toy Story! [LAUGHS] Yeah. And again, that’s a testament to what is organically there, at the Warrens’ haunted museum. They have so many interesting artifacts they’ve collected. Yes, there are other stories within that world that I think would be interesting. Even if they don’t become theatrical movies, I would love to explore that as anthology standalone films for streaming, for example. Which I think would be really fun, to explore these different stories as anthologies.
Question: And a way to keep that universe rolling for all the fans?
James Wan: That’s right.
Question: So, circling back from the future of the franchise to this current milestone, the 10th anniversary of that film, can you reflect on what it’s collectively meant to fans? Because I remember conversations about it, that it brought people back to horror in a way that evoked those beloved classics like The Exorcist, The Omen, those seminal `70s films.
James Wan: I’ll tell you what it did—and again, this is a testament to New Line’s confidence in the movie—it brought back horror movies during the summer period. Because up until The Conjuring, horror had been pushed towards the fall, towards the Halloween period. And most people felt summer horror movies did not play, they couldn’t compete with all the big tentpoles, action, comic book movies. But The Conjuring came along and proved that a good horror movie can still break out in the summer period. And since then, we’ve seen horror movie after horror movie play in the summer period, while now the bigger movies are finding that they have to compete with this smaller, scary horror movie. I love that we are bringing scares to the bigger films, which is great! [LAUGHS]
Question: Well, the fans are there for it all year round, right?
James Wan: That’s right, yeah. The fans, they’re such loyal fans, and we’re very thankful for them. It’s pretty incredible because, when I first started out in the business, horror movies or the horror genre was always treated like the bastard stepchild. It was a dirty word. But now we’ve seen it time and time again, “the horror genre has saved our industry.”
